carving – Nerdisthttp://nerdist.com
Sat, 10 Dec 2016 02:30:53 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1This Night’s King Watermelon Is Delicious and Full of Seedshttp://nerdist.com/this-nights-king-watermelon-is-delicious-and-full-of-seeds/
Sat, 18 Jun 2016 19:00:16 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=413359Let’s all take a moment and reflect on just how awesome the internet can be. Through it we get to appreciate so many things from around that world that we otherwise would have never known about, and when it comes to fandom, we get to rejoice in the fact that there are people everywhere who love the same movies, comics, and shows that we do. And thanks to a recent post on io9, we get to see just about the sweetest tribute to Game of Thrones and The Night’s King that will ever be.

Italian artist Valeriano Fatica took his love of Game of Thrones and expressed it with his amazingly artistic fruit carving skills. The video above, set to a bad-ass metal cover of the GOT main theme song, shows the work involved in creating such a beautiful representation of the head of the menacing Night’s King. It’s fascinating to see the amount of detail one can accomplish by using different thicknesses of the watermelon’s rind as various levels of shading before even getting to the delicate flesh of the fruit.

Fatica’s no newbie to the fruit and/or vegetable carving game; his YouTube channel is a veritable farmer’s market of produce-carving videos with each displaying incredibly intricate creations of pop culture icons. Among them are Cthulhu in both potatoandwatermelon form, as well as a Joker made out of a pumpkin–which I think qualifies it as a Jokerlantern.

Have you ever attempted your own edible pieces of sculpture before? Let’s talk about all the juicy details in the comments below!

]]>Skull Carved From 4-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Set For Auctionhttp://nerdist.com/skull-carved-from-4-billion-year-old-meteorite-set-for-auction/
Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:00:12 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=336312We’ve seen meteorite knives, and meteorite swords, but here’s a new one: a space-rock skull is up for sale at Los Angeles’ Bonhams auction house. The sculpture was carved by Bali-based artist Lee Downey from a hulking 105 pound (47.6 kg) chunk of the Gibeon Meteorite, which was found in Namibia in 1836.

Despite reports that the piece is made from “one of the rarest” forms of meteorite found on Earth, some 25 tons of Gibeon space rocks have been recovered to date. And while specimens can no longer be exported from Namibia, it’s still one of the most commonly available meteorites on the market. Before you start reaching for your Benjamins, you should know that you’ll need a lot of them. Four-billion-year-old celestial objects don’t come cheap, rare or not. We estimate that the original piece the skull was cut from would have fetched somewhere around $150,000.

Gibeon meteorites are typically composed of iron, nickel and small amounts of cobalt, but every so often, other minerals make their way into the mix. These inclusions can increase the piece’s value, and as you can see in the photos, Downey’s skull, dubbed “Yorick” after the fictional character in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” has one just above the right eye. The yellow-orange stripe is a block of tridymite, a morph of silica (glass) that forms when the element fuses at high temperatures.

Speaking of temperature, you’ve no-doubt noticed those beautiful lines running across the skull. That crystalline pattern, known as the Widmanstatten pattern, is characteristic of meteorites that have cooled over millions of years in the vacuum of space. By brushing the skull in a nitric acid wash, Downey was able to tease the pattern out – much in the same way that Bourdain did with his space knife.

So, which is better? A piece of space-rock art or an original meteorite? This is largely subjective. We’ve been carving meteorites for thousands of years. In fact, the Egyptians even used the cosmological treasures to make jewelry. I personally prefer to see specimens left intact, but to Downey, the carving represents “the human aspiration to comprehend the mysteries of the universe.”

]]>Pumpkin Carving, Nerdist-Stylehttp://nerdist.com/pumpkin-carving-nerdist-style/
http://nerdist.com/pumpkin-carving-nerdist-style/#commentsSun, 06 Oct 2013 17:00:01 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=92103Halloween, and Fall, are all about the pumpkin, or haven’t you been to Starbucks lately? The person in front of you is going to order the pumpkin spice latte, and she’s going to debate it with herself for at least three minutes before ordering while you impatiently wait to just get your Venti English Breakfast Tea. What? Anyway, pumpkins. Yes, it’s time to go to the patch (a/k/a your local supermarket parking lot), pick out a good one, bring it home, think about carving it, giving up, putting it out whole on your doorstep, and cleaning up the remnants from your driveway after the local kids Billy Corgan your gourd, which they will do.

But it’s early enough to plan that carving in case you’re so inspired that you actually do it. Or maybe you want them to flame up, or emit smoke. And so, some ideas:

From DC Comics, it’s The Joker:

How about this one of The Grinch?:

Same artist (Brandy Davis), this time of Gizmo (don’t get him wet):

Say you just wanna cut and slash your basic face into the damn thing. Here’s the Black and Decker jigsaw method in action:

Flaming pumpkin! Rainbow flame pumpkin! Using roach killer, hand sanitizer, Heet, and a butane lighter! I would urge you NOT TO TRY THIS ONE AT HOME. Or anywhere. It’s cool looking, but, you know, flames and roach killer and stuff. And look for the bug, against which the roach killer was totally ineffective:

This one just smokes up, using glycerin and tea candles. Marginally less insane:

Inevitably, people want to try to carve an Elvis pumpkin. This one stops short of a full Elvis carve. And it uses the young slim Elvis instead of Fat Bloated Elvis, which I would think is more appropriate for a pumpkin:

Oh, F it. Just blow ’em up:

Same guy makes ’em glow, too:

And no collection of pumpkin carving would be complete without the awesome toy and collectible designer and World’s Greatest Pumpkin Carver Ray Villafane. He makes it look easy, but….:

He sells a DVD tutorial set. This promo video shows off his work, which is unbefreakinlievable:

Here’s his world record massive carving, which involves zombies. It is awesome.

Martha Stewart was impressed:

His whole family gets in on the act:

And his latest… oh, my:

What are you waiting for? Get to it… before the bored neighborhood kids “carve” your pumpkin for you…